


How Soon Is Now

by lisachan



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Cheating, F/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-18
Updated: 2016-02-18
Packaged: 2018-05-21 09:13:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6046099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lisachan/pseuds/lisachan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The scent of coffee is what he misses the most in the morning.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Soon Is Now

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



The scent of coffee is what he misses the most in the morning. 

Ginny always wakes him up with a cup of coffee. She doesn’t bring it to him in bed, she doesn’t call him for it, that wouldn’t be like her at all, but she makes it, every morning, and she spells the cup to keep it hot as she goes have a shower, preparing for work.

Harry wakes up to that smell. He’s done it every day for the past twenty years, and it’s become a part of him, like his wand, his cloak, like his glasses and his scar, like his messy hair and his green eyes, like his sons and daughter, like his job, like his friends.

(Though his friends are very hard to think about, right now. So he decides not to.)

Coffee means home. It means family and happiness. To the smell of coffee most of his most tender memories are linked – the first time his children decided to try it, and he laughed watching their tiny mouths purse in a disgusted grimace, Ginny’s fierce smile in the morning, the knowledge of being alive, of having survived everything for a chance to live his life at its fullest. The smell of coffee means he’s arrived, that he’s made it, that happiness is here, now, it’s a warm house, three beautiful children, an amazing wife, an adventurous job, the privilege of living free.

There’s no smell of coffee in this bleak hotel room. He wakes up smelling dampness and cheap soap on the sheets. He wakes up to the wet smell of rainy London, to the old scent of moth-eaten wood, and hidden underneath all of this, hard to detect and so distant despite how close there are sleeping next to one another, Hermione’s scent.

She smells clean and sweet. She smells like something he shouldn’t want to touch. She smells dangerous, despite being the person he knows best in the whole world. He can meet her when they’re all together and she’s just old Hermione, smart and quick and bright and kind, passionate about everything, with that beautiful brain of her and her face, that hasn’t changed a bit since they were kids. And then when he meets her alone she always seems so different, so mysterious. There’s something threatening about her. And he undresses her to get to the core of her, he dives inside her to get his Hermione back, the kid he used to run to when something was wrong, the one who always had a solution for him, didn’t matter if it was what he wanted to hear at the time or not. 

He thinks about the Hermione he knew before, before marriage and family life, before the job, before growing up, finding out about adulthood, about what it really means, that’s not becoming a better version of yourself, but repeating yourself again and again, a thousand times over, that you’re alright with what you’ve become, even if you don’t know if it’s better or worse than the kid you were.

Sometimes, despite everything, he misses the kid he was. And the pain, and the anger, and the grief. He hurts more when he realizes how distant these feelings are now, than when he thinks the happiness he feels in his life at the moment could be passing too, just like those feelings were.

And when he thinks about that, and he struggles to keep smiling nonetheless – because that’s being an adult too, that’s having responsibilities, being responsible for someone else’s happiness, not just oneself’s own – that’s when he thinks about Hermione and he wonders.

What could’ve been.

What he could’ve become.

If, by staying by her side, he could’ve kept himself connected to the pain he mourns the loss of now.

And he asks himself, would Hermione have made coffee for him every day of their life together, if he had married here? Would she have spelled the cup to keep it hot as she waited for him to wake up? Would she have met him with a fierce smile upon seeing him in the kitchen, would it all have been the same if he had just. Tried. Back then, when he still could. If he had been honest. If he hadn’t gotten distracted. If she had seen. If Ron hadn’t. 

Then Hermione wakes up. She turns on her side between the sheets and opens her sleepy eyes on him. She smiles softly, that smile she smiles every time they find themselves together like this in a sad place like this, a tragic smile, all guilt and nameless regrets. He loves that smile, ‘cause it mirrors his own. He loves her desperately, because they’re prisoner of the same lie, of the same responsibilities, and they ache for the same kind of release, to relive the same set of memories. Memories of a time when life felt impossibly harder, and yet was infinitely easier.

She moves towards him, sliding on the mattress. He opens her arms and welcomes her against his chest, exhaling a breath he wasn’t aware of holding. “Do we have to go now?” she asks in a low, rough voice, and he smiles because she sounds different than he remembers her, but he’s still so drawn to her he doesn’t mind.

“It’s still early,” he answers, kissing her on top of her head, enjoying the tickling sensation of her frizzy hair against his nose.

“How do you know?” Hermione chuckles, hugging him tighter, “You haven’t checked the time.”

He doesn’t tell her it doesn’t matter. He’s got his own way of knowing. There’s still no smell of coffee in the air. It’s obviously too soon to wake up.


End file.
